64 Kimberly Palmer. The best eyewitness in a murder case is dead." Palmer had been brought to Idaho with Currier's body, Haws said. Paradis, Gibson, and Evans threw Currier into the woods. ''The Volkswagen van maybe went out of control and went into a slow rollover on the bank," he went on "At that moment, these three men had a terrified young lady on their hands. They couldn't just release her and let her walk free-she knew too much. They couldn't go walking back down into civi- lization with her as a hostage-it would never work. In desperation, Kimberly Palmer managed to break free and run for her life down through the woods. As she went down through the foliage, clutching her shm under her arm, in the middle of this dense forest she suddenly came upon this three-strand barbwire fence that was three foot tall, she was five foot tall, no way she was going to go over that. With her in- stinct, her softball practice"- Palmer had been a member of a softball team-"whatever, she tried to go under that fence and sus- tained very superficial scrapings on her chest and belly. In the process of doing so she snagged the rear of her pants. "By the time she got clear of the fence, her assailants were upon her, and there beside the creek, in or- der to irrevocably silence Kimberly Anne Palmer, hands were wrapped around her neck that shattered the cri- coid cartilage. "Perhaps forgotten in the moment of killing, heat of killing, as she went down she landed on top of one of the defen- dants' hat. And then in her last instinc- tive gasps for air through her damaged throat, she drew not oxygen but water. "These are the facts which will be shown to you at trial and which will then lawfully require your verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree." When it was the moment for Para- dis's lawyer to face the jury, he might have said, "Ladies and gentlemen, Kim- berly Palmer did not die in Idaho. The case that the prosecution is presenting is invented. Severa] eyewitnesses will de- scribe seeing Palmer's body at a house in Spokane, Washington; some of them will tell you that Don Paradis was not present when the murder took place. No one will say that he was. Like Scott Currier, Ms. Palmer was already dead when the van arrived in Idaho, let alone entered the hills above Post Falls. KIm- berly Palmer died at South 24 Dearborn Street, in Spokane, Washington, early on the morning of June 21, 1980. Con- sequently, Idaho has no jurisdiction whatsoever in this matter." The lawyer, however, made no such statements in his opening remarks , T HE trial seemed to turn on three el- ements, all of them harmful to Paradis. These elements were hIS court- appointed lawyer; the entry into evi- dence of pictures of Currier's corpse; and the testimony of the medical examiner, William Brady. To take them in order: Paradis asked to be represented by Roger Peven, the attorney from Spokane who had got him acquitted at his tria] for Currier's murder, in Washington. Instead, Judge Haman appointed a lawyer who, it turned out, had a conflict that made him unable to take the case. Haman then ap- pointed a Coeur d'Alene lawyer named William Brown, a man in early middle age. Brown had been a policeman for twenty-two years in New York and New Jersey. Then he attended law school at Columbia, and after he graduated he moved to Idaho. When Brown was appointed to represent Paradis, in April of 1981, he had been a lawyer for seven months. He had never represented a client charged with mur- der. He had never defended a client charged with any felony. He had never appeared before a jury in a criminal case. Furthermore, after arriving in Idaho Brown had applied for a position with the Coeur d' Alene police and had been hired as a reserve officer and park patrol- man. He was also appointed a deputy in the Kootenai County sheriff's depart- ment-the county in which Paradis was being tried. Marc Haws, the prosecutor, knew that Brown was a Coeur d'Alene policeman. Judge Haman knew that Brown was a Coeur d'Alene policeman. According to Paradis, however, Brown did not tell him about his affiliation with the Coeur d'Alene police, and Judge Haman did not reveal to Paradis that he had appointed as his attorney a Coeur d' Alene policeman. Paradis says that he found out in 1993, when he read a story " THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 13, 1995 by David Bond, a reporter for the Coeur d'Alene Press, who had called the Police Department on a hunch and asked if Brown had been a member. By this time, Brown was dead. He died in 1990, of cancer. He represented Paradis through several unsuccessful appeals, un- til 1986. That year, he signed an affidavit acknowledging his shortcom- ings as Paradis's attorney. In it, he takes eighteen paragraphs to note them and all the things that he failed to do on Paradis's behalf: for example, to chal- lenge as a member of the jury a woman who said several times before the trIal that Paradis was probably guilty and would have to prove that he was inno- cent; to ask the jurors what they thought about bikers; to challenge medical testi- mony that he beheved was false; and to ask for help from Peven, the lawyer who had got Paradis acquitted in Washing- ton, even though Peven had offered it. Paradis says that he asked Brown to have Roseanna Moline tell the jury what had happened to Palmer at his house. Brown, though, called a woman named Aera Beaver to provide an alibi for Paradis for the night and early morning of the murders-someone, that is, who said, in effect, that while Paradis was be- ing identified from the picture on his li- cense by the police in Post Falls he was actually somewhere else. Aera Beaver told the police a few days after the mur- ders that she had spent the night before the night of the murders with Paradis. At his trial, she said it was the night of the murders. At another time, she had been confused about whether it was the night of the murders or the rught before. The six people other than ParadIs who say they saw Palmer's corpse in Spokane are Tom Gibson, Larry Evans, Charles Amacher, Roseanna Moline, Terry Wayne Jones, and the Gypsy Joker who met Paradis at his door and has asked that his name not be men- tioned. Brown did not have any of them testify-he said that he was unable to find Moline, and he was concerned that Gibson might say that Paradis had hit Currier. Nor did he ever tell the jury that he believed Spokane was where Palmer actually died. The second element of the trIal that went against Paradis was the introduc- tion by Haws of pictures of Currier's corpse. In 1983, the Idaho Supreme Court would rule 3-2 against Paradis's